Doctors Playing Doctor

Reported May 2010

ATLANTA, Ga. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Every year, 36,000 U.S. children are born with heart defects, or abnormalities that keep their hearts from functioning properly, putting their lives at risk. Fixing these problems can mean complex, repeated surgeries and every case is unique. Now, a virtual tool is giving surgeons a new way to predict and improve the outcome for these tiny patients, before they ever get to the Operating Room.

Georgia Chapman is only two, yet she's already had two major operations to repair congenital defects in her heart.

"Didn't know nothing was really wrong with her until I took her in for a diaper rash," Ashley Chapman, Georgia’s mother, told Ivanhoe. "They thought they heard a heart murmur and they sent me to a specialist."

A successful surgery gave Georgia a second chance at life.

In complex pediatric heart surgeries, precision is key. That's where biomedical engineers from Georgia Tech and Emory University come in.

With an MRI image of the patient's heart, researchers apply the science of fluid dynamics, or how things flow, to first identify the patent's specific problem. The system shows how different surgical approaches change the patient's blood flow so the surgeon can see which approach would work best.

"I think the beauty of it is it really allows them to look at various options without going into the operating room and figuring out what they're going to do or preplanning the day before," Ajit Yoganathan, Ph.D., a biomedical engineer at Georgia Tech and Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., explained.

The goal is better outcomes for patients like a child born with only one working ventricle.

"After the operation we would hope that the child would have the best possible operation for him or her, so that they could have a lifetime of normal heart function," Kirk Kanter, M.D., chief of pediatric heart surgery at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., said.

It's science that could make a big difference for little hearts.

Though the virtual surgery tool is still experimental, researchers believe the simulations could be eventually adapted to allow pre-planning for a variety of pediatric heart surgeries, potentially improving outcomes for those with serious heart problems.

The American Association of Physicists in Medicine, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.-USA, and the Division of Fluid Dynamics - American Physical Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Don Fernandez
Media Relations Specialist
(404) 894-6016

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
IEEE
Pender McCarter
IEEE http://www.ieee.org
IEEE-USA http://www.ieeeusa.org
p.mccarter@ieee.org

Dr. Sudarshan Chamakuri
Medical Physicist
American Association of Physicists in Medicine
http://www.aapm.org
Radiationtherapy@hotmail.com

Division of Fluid Dynamics - American Physical Society
Dr. James Brasseur
The Pennsylvania State University
(814) 865-3159
brasseur@psu.edu

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